Wednesday, September 26, 2018

Introduction

Joining everyone together is a challenge that resonates with many organizations we talk to. People who work in different locations or countries.

Problem

Employees who work for separate groups or entities within a business. Even those people who don’t have access to a professional email address. What tools can you use to make sure that everyone is part of the conversation wherever they work?

Solution

The answer to this lies in finding new digital platforms that are mobile-first. Mobile allows you to connect everyone across your organization, and give a voice to people who have been beyond the reach of traditional IT.

Azure has many services accessible from anywhere.

An example:

A globally dispersed financial team at Schneider Electric, based in Rueil-Malmaison, France, struggled to collaborate on quarterly business reviews. Team members were unable to coauthor documents and spent unproductive time searching for the latest versions of source files for financial reports. Now, they use Microsoft Teams to discuss, store, and find current files, and update them in real time. Workers save time locating documents, no longer losing up to 30 minutes each time they resume work on a project.

One of our mottos at Schneider is ‘Life is on,’ which refers to being energized, efficient, and connected. Teams enables this vision.

Rodolphe Aubin: Vice President, Financial Planning and Analysis

Schneider Electric

Julie Issemann found herself sitting at her computer, waiting for a coworker to close a file so she could add the latest revenue figures to it. Issemann, a financial analyst at global energy management giant Schneider Electric, was used to working across time zones and geographies with the rest of her Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A) team, which has contacts based across the globe. She was also used to feeling far away from the rest of her team.

“I wasn’t always sure I had the most current file—documents could end up in different systems, like email, file storage, or someone’s hard drive. I’d wonder where to find the document I needed, and which version of it I should use,” says Issemann. “When someone was working on a document that I needed to update, I had to call or email to find out when they’d be finished. Or I’d keep hitting refresh to see if the file was closed. After I finally got access, sometimes I’d find out the next day that a colleague had added new data to a previous version of it by mistake. We’d spend long hours before each big deadline waiting, searching, and sometimes redoing work.”

Conclusion

Any organisation with dispersed teams or offices can benefit greatly from the Modern Workplace such as Microsoft Teams and Azure Cloud with Office 365.